Sleeping Beauty awakes

FROM the vestiges of ancient fish genes, geneticists have reconstructed a stretch of DNA that can hop in and out of chromosomes. And they claim that the revived gene could speed up the development of gene therapy to tackle disease in humans.

Mobile genetic units called transposons have long been known to exist in insects and worms. These segments of DNA, normally only a few thousand base pairs long, include the gene for the enzyme transposase, whose function is to snip transposons out and insert them elsewhere on the chromosome.

"So far nothing like this has been found in vertebrates," says Perry Hackett, a molecular geneticist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In fact, Hackett says, transposons have probably not hopped around vertebrate chromosomes for at least 15 million years. But recently, inactive fragments of ancient transposase genes were discovered lingering in the chromosomes of salmon, trout and zebra ...

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